Author Archives: Judy O'Connell

About Judy O'Connell

Educator, learner, blogger, librarian, technology girl, author and consultant. Transforming education and libraries. Innovation for life.

Social networking explained

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I know many teachers I talk to struggle to understand what the social networking world of MySpace etc is really all about. Even if our teachers see students accessing MySpace or similar sites, what this social networking software augers for the future is beyond their ken.

So Facebook – the complete Biography from Mashuble is a very useful document – the sort of thing that you can hand out or email to teachers to read. Teachers understand biographies!

What is worth noting is the shift in communication patterns. Teachers and parents will tell you that kids live on msn or other instant messaging. Yes…and more…..

I am just waiting for an aussie to post a message about social networking behaviours, like this one from Bokardo

I recently talked with a father of a MySpace user who said that he tried to email his daughter using regular email and she never responded. He asked her why and she said, “I use MySpace for email. Send me mail there”. So he created an account and now he messages her there. Wow.

I would like to find out more about school email accounts and what kids think about them. Are we applying a digital version of “desks in rows in the classroom” approach to our school communications? How do we expand out thinking in this?

Google Offerings

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One to watch, from Stephen Abram: Google has finally launched it’s MS Office competitive threat today:

You can read more at Information Week.

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google’s E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google’s data center, branded with customers’ domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.That’s the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.”

GRRRR – would this explain why my Google desktop has suddenly been giving me merry hell on different machines? Reconfigurations and ‘big work’ at Google datacentre? I gave up and uninstalled it from two of my boxes!

Google’s work in digitising the worlds books in the Google Book Search project is also one to think about in terms of Library 2.0. Finally some inside information is provided by ACRLblog:

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education offers an article (by Scott Carlson) that will give academic librarians a bit more insight into that relationship by providing a link to the actual contract between Google and the University of California Library System. The contract was obtained in response to an open-records request from The Chronicle.According to Carlson’s report:

“the university will provide at least 2.5 million volumes to Google for scanning, starting with 600 books a day and ratcheting up over time to 3,000 volumes a day. Materials pulled for scanning will be back on the shelves of their libraries within 15 days.”

By anyone’s standards that is a heck of a lot of books being digitized each day.

This whole concept of a digitized library is an important one to think about. I am all in favour of an online world and digital access everything. But I am also all in favour of using “real” books to develop and promote reading. I see a great place for good books in good digital libraries. I don’t mind if those books are also in digital form, or on ipods, or in braille – it is having alternative choices that are tactile, couch friendly and sometimes NOT digital that is so important.

The magic of a shared story, kids in happy piles on the library floor relaxed and in a haven away from the stresses of life – that’s a nice, wonderful, important, vital library experience. The magic of senior students reading, discussing, testing, taunting, challenging authors as they discuss plot, purpose, values etc irreplaceable. Or do we envisage sitting on a digital couch in SecondLife, reading a digital book, which we got from a digital source? No, we need to keep some hold on reality while we work with technology.

Literacy and good reading are at the heart of civilisation and culture, and while we continue to digitise we should never dismiss or destroy our books and our libraries.

That’s what repressive and distructive regimes have done. Learn from history: Let’s not digitise and then burn our books!

Cut and paste literacy

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Reading through some of the Sites of Current Interest to Me from John Connell:the Blog led me to Rough Type and a comment about a paper published about My Space. The paper stands in contrast to the lack of dialogue about MySpace in educational circles. (Partly this is because some schools block access, so by blocking they think that usage goes away; partly it is because they have never heard of MySpace; partly this is because they see MySpace as being irrelevant)

Whether its plagiarism, or creativity, or school intranets, or learning spaces – looking at student behaviours in MySpace is essential if we are to work with the potential of technology and the potential of our kids to create a ‘new future’. Ogh…I know ‘new future’ sounds cliched…but whatever your term for future planning, MySpace and it’s ilk are here and ready to be our advisors and help shape our understandings.

The paper is an indepth analysis of elements of MySpace with important ideas for our understanding of literacy in this Web 2.0 space.

Is illiteracy the new literacy? Berkeley’s Dan Perkel writes, in a paper, Cut and Paste Literacy, on MySpace profiles: “A social perspective of literacy helps show that a part of [the] problem in this framing of copying and pasting as a literacy practice is that it does not neatly fit within common educational practices. From the perspective of the social niche of traditional schooling, to copy and paste is to plagiarize, unless there is careful attribution of sources …

‘All Your Own Work’ in a Web 2.0 World

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I attended an a full day seminar organised by ALSANSW looking at the issue of Plagiarism in light of the NSW Board of Studies unit “Working with Others” soon to be compulsory for testing in Year 10. My task was to provide a context for thinking about plagiarism which included an understanding of the Web 2.0 world of students and teachers.

Apart form ‘showcasing’ Web 2.0 my aim was to encourage teachers and teacher-librarians to re-examine what it means to create a community of enquiry for themselves and for their students…by participating in new forms of information organization and sharing…..like social bookmarking, wiki, and blogs. We have to recognize the level of social networking that kids engage in more and more, and the fact that information seeking will sometimes take place via instant messenger, myspace or other social ways.

With Web 2.0 the purpose and function of learning as defined by teachers needs revision. Maybe……..

The purpose of learning should…

  • Be informed by connections and communication
  • Promote open sharing of knowledge
  • Allow for individuals making decisions on their own

The function of learning should be….

  • About being a member of the community of practice
  • Recognize that all spaces are learning places

Perhaps Web 2.0 learning is defined by three things:

Focus

  • On identity
  • Who we are in society

Framework

  • Multitasking multi-modal environment
  • Virtual learning mode

Future

  • Personal integrity and social contribution
  • Individuality and creativity

A very interesting day, with some curious interactions and comments afterwards. The one that made me chuckle was “we are never going to use these [Web2.0] technologies”.

Hmm, a bit like the network meeting I organised back in Term 4, 1995. Some ‘system’ representatives came along – because I had organised a chap who brought his own computer, and who could access Ozemail at $5.00 hr and show us ‘THE INTERNET’. Yes, these visitors said to me “Judy, you shouldn’t have organised this – this internet business will never happen in schools!”.

OOPS! How about Web 2.0 then??

 

Teacher as Learner in Web 2.0 – doing it!

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Scan is a quarterly journal produced by the NSW Department of Education and Training which focuses on the interaction between information and effective student learning.

Scan contains articles on:

  • teachers and teacher-librarians collaborating
  • information literacy and supporting reading
  • integrating ICT (information communication technology) in teaching and learning
  • practical programming and teaching ideas
  • practical ideas for library management.

Thanks to the up-to-the minute relevance of this journal, and a fun morning of talking enthusiastically about Web 2.0 – I ended up being asked to write an article about Web 2.0 for them. Lucky!

I did that, and wrote it for our teacher learners who are still going to wake up one fine Web 2.0 morning and discover there is a new world out there.

For those who don’t have access to the article, Engaging the Google generation through Web 2.0 you can get a copy here or from the Resource section of this blog. Usual copyright and correct attribution rules around use of this article apply, being printed in SCAN Vol 25 Number 3 August 2006.

Teacher as Learner in Web 2.0

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Quarter of a year blogging! Hooray!!

OK, time for a personal whinge 😦

The last week has been a frustrating week in many ways, but the most frustrating of all has been the ‘negotiations’ I have had in discussion about my academic study program.

Supposedly in a Doctor of Science Education Program with a technology focus through Curtin University, I have come to the conclusion that unless I can find an academic environment that reflects the changing learning landscape of kids today I am totally wasting my time seeking to learn more about learning landscapes via an academic study program.

Really nice folks at the uni – don’t get me wrong – but just NOT giving me the learning extension that I need.

Here is an example – the reader for Learning Environements, which I must read (ok, I can do that) but which I also have to demonstrate that I understand (!) contains 16 papers, all from the 90s, and one only from 2001. Now you and I know that this represents Web 1.0 generation of thinkers. Even if they are ‘cool constructivist thinkers’, they are talking about a learning environment and learning landscape that is rapidly becoming irrelevant. While it is important to ground current research and learning in past knowledge and research – I do not have this option.

“You can add a bit on about Web 2.0 if you like, but do not make it the main thrust of your paper. You must demonstrate that you understand our philosophy”

Despite the fact that a previous module run by Peter Taylor extended my thinking on constructivism in marvelous ways, this time around I feel that being forced to operate in the constraints of the concepts presented in our Reader is really a great example of ‘enculturation’ and not at all about border crossing into Web 2.0 in theory and practice.

I suggest that practitioners in the field who are blogging and sharing their experiences through books, presentations, seminars, podcasts etc are teaching much more about what is possible than this academic approach to readers and stale research processes allows.

Practitioners such as Stephen Downes, Will Richardson, Doug Johnson, Stephen Abram, Michael Stephens, John Connell, Leigh Blackall, Ewen McIntosh, and Alan November are engaging with the learning needed in new environements, gathering me up in the learning as they go – something my current academic program does not do.

I suggest that attending events like The Global Summit will also help me along in my learning. I suggest that opportunities to interact with global colleagues like the event at TeachMeet06 will give me learning opportunities that no analysis of a “reader” would ever manage. How sad that I have to ‘regurgitate’ to prove that I understand.

What I have learned and continue to learn through social networking, Web 2.0 and peer to peer discussions is far superior to my current academic offerings.

My students and my schools are the priority. It is vital to innovate, have fun, and learn all at the same time…..so unless I can actively research SecondLife, or an aspect of Web 2.0 in 2007 …… that’s it to my current academic institution.

I want to thank all the wonderful people who have contributed to my professional learning – fantastic stuff for this teacher as learner.

Remix epitomises Web 2.0

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A concept I like to present when doing professional development about Web 2.0 is the idea of “remix”. If we look at millenials, we see that all their digital actions are associated with remixing and personalising of music, video, pictures, information – whatever really!

So the reappearance of Writely as a Google product, is another example of a writing tool that allows students to cut and paste, as well as combine and create, all in the one online tool. It features collaborative editing — multiple editors on the same doc at once — and can be used as the editor for writing your blog, saving out to a post instead of a file on your machine.

Writely – the Web 2.0 word processor is now accepting signups again.
We cannot escape ‘remix’ – nor would I suggest that we should! What is more critical is that educators come to better understand the shifting agenda in this ‘remix’ culture, and appreciate the strength of this approach and integrate it into our educational aims. Of course we have to work out what this means – and how ‘remix’ can be about developing creativity, fostering critical thinking, collaboration, and knowledge creation.

So a post on this topic from Sheila Webber is timely, as she alerts us to to the fact that Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel have generously posted Chapter 3 (“New literacies: concepts and practices”) of the forthcoming 2nd edition of their book New Literacies http://www.geocities.com/newliteracies/ and on their blog they had also posted Chapter 4 (“New literacies in everyday practice”) as well.

Three experts from Part 2: New literacies in everyday practice make a good summary of my views on ‘remix’:

Until recently the idea of ‘remix’ as a practice of taking cultural artifacts and combining and manipulating them into a new kind of creative blend was associated almost entirely with recorded music.

While this remains the dominant conception of remix, its conceptual life has expanded recently in important and interesting ways within the context of increasing activism directed at copyright and intellectual property legislation.

We accept this conceptual extension of ‘writing’ to include practices of producing, exchanging and negotiating digitally remixed texts, which may employ a single medium or may be multimedia remixes. At the same time we also recognize as forms of remix various practices that do not necessarily involve digitally remixing sound, image and animation, such as fanfiction writing and producing manga comics (whether on paper or on the screen).

Library 2.0 world of searching

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Searching is an essential skill for our Google Generation. Have you noticed the primacy of Google in the minds of students? Have you been told that libraries don’t matter because we have Google? This is not a bad thing really, as we are being forced to consider the complexity of our online world, and the remarkable range and depth of information resources that are available to us.

Thinking about this and developments in libraries I re-read a post written while back at Informancy on the shift in libraries and librarians raised some really interesting issues in the post and comments. Lets just take the issue of searching…

In library and information science precision and recall are two critical elements of the organization and retrieval of information in that they are inversely related. As the rate of recall grows with every addition to the Google database, the level of precision for responses from a Google search falls. Library and information science is about finding ways to increase both of these levels in tandem…that would be the holy grail of searching.

Searching is certainly at the crux of our ongoing debate – and perhaps the area that we need to grapple with most in terms of positioning (school) Library 2.0.

Comment to that post really grabbed my attention..

to me it seems pretty clear that in a net-centric environment, we’re more likely to find our solution to the needle in a haystack with advances in social software technologies tied to intelligent agents. As our folksonomies grow and contextualize information within knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing communities, the value of personalized agents should increase.

Christopher Harris also said

In a recent workshop that involved envisioning libraries 10 years from now, one of the things that stuck out most clearly for me was the need for the library to be the search engine. …. In a virtual library dealing with electronic resources, my avatar can move through rooms that are the facets of the information.

These comments help me to make sense of some ideas that I have put into a paper recently related to Library 2.0. Amongst the usual things I also suggested that future Library 2.0 developments might include

  • Searching of social network repositories alongside federated searching
  • Searching of other search aggregators such as Technorati
  • personalisation of the information research process with a personal library storage space
  • addition of virtual library environments such as Second Life
  • addition of read/write interactivity and Fan Fiction type activities
  • and ultimately ….adaptive hypermedia responsiveness to search strategies, stored information, personal tag structures and subject requirements

What we need is a new Library 2.0 Matrix – that allows us to draw elements from the resource environment of the library/information user and the Web 2.0 environment of the library/inforamtion user. This matrix would allow our schools students to move and be transparently and intuitively in both environments, rather than in two seperate environments – as they now are.

Need to get a good graphic to demonstrate this….sometime.

Here a more good thoughts from elearnspace:

Most of what we call “social network tools” will eventually just be features of existing tools. In very limited ways, this is starting with MS Outlook (and other email/communication tools) – the notification that someone is online, the link to names in address books, etc. are first run attempts at making social networking a part of work…not an activity separate from work

Learning Technology Forum

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Wednesday and Thursday this week saw Learning Technology teachers from primary and secondary schools in the Parramatta Diocese gather for a two-day forum.

The presentations from this forum will be made available via podcast – and I hope provide the links for you when they are available .

The forum was opened by Kevin Jones, and as Head of Curriculum he was able to provide some clear insights to ‘set the scene’.

Kevin focussed on the beliefs that underpin/enable/epitomise 21st century learning, and the approaches that will enable (if not ensure) quality 21st century learning. Some of the key points were about the beliefs that must drive our understanding and the staffroom approaches that help us be more effective.

The Beliefs
Learning in the 21st century is about

  • student “centredness”.
  • Student ownership
  • Student choices
  • Student responsibility

The Approach

Collaborative work practices (staffroom approaches) will help us meet the learning needs of our students.

These practices must include use of technology that enhances collaborative work practices for:

  • Programming Organisation of assessment
  • Marking to standards
  • Evaluation
  • Cross-curricular approaches

As Kevin explained, “Our approaches and practices have to reflect our beliefs about individualised learning”. “We need to think about our own approach” “We need to think about what our current practices indicate about our beliefs about learning”.

Then we will engage more effectively in how to use the tools.

I followed with a presentation on Engaging the google generation through Web 2.0. For this session I drew from the article of the same title published in SCAN, Vol 25 No 3 August 2006.

Synchronising my personal information world!

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As a fan of Firefox (and now of Flock) I thought it worth mentioning that Firefox has an extension from Google to help you syncrhronise your activites.

While social bookmarking with tools like Del.ic.ious has made a huge impact (and improvement) on the way we can store information about our web resources, I still like the option to synchronise between my computers.

After a bit of a skirmish with Google Desktop – which I find very useful for indexing my machine – I am interested to see how effective this Firefox extension will be.

From Google Labs:Google Labs

If you use Firefox on more than one computer then you will be well served by looking at the Google Browser Synch tool.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent
cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

You can encrypt all of the information that flows between your computer and Google.

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